Our Technology

What makes Glance so simple and reliable?

The idea behind Glance is refreshingly simple: let everyone see what you're talking about.  With one click, show your screen to anyone anywhere with a browser.  And they join with one click.  But behind that simplicity and dependability, there's a lot of powerful technology.

Show from a PC or Mac

You can host a Glance session from a Windows^® PC or Apple Mac^®.  Glance runs on both, and you can use both with your Glance subscription.

Our native client applications are tuned to efficiently capture dynamic screen updates on either platform.  And both use standard and proprietary compression technology to get those updates to your guests fast.  Both clients deal with the intricacies of remote control on each OS.  So not only can you give control of your mouse and keyboard to your guest, but a Mac guest can control Windows and a Windows guest can control a Mac!

View with no install. Any browser.

Glance uses a very small viewer that starts quickly right from a browser.  So there's no long download or complicated install when guests join your session. 

To ensure the highest level of success, Glance can use multiple types of viewers.  On a Windows^® PC running Internet Explorer, Glance can use our fastest viewer, a native add-on (sometimes called a plug-in) built using ActiveX technology.  On other operating systems (Mac^®, Linux, etc.) or browsers, or if your guest is in a high security environment, Glance will use Java™ technology to connect.  See www.java.com for more information or to install Java on your computer.  Selecting the right viewer happens automatically, but you can check our Can You Glance page to verify what works best for you or your guests.

Network Connectivity

We know, your 9:00am demo needs to start at 9:00am.  Unfortunately, the Internet is a big place, and not everyone's connection is as fast or reliable as they'd like. Combine that with today's security concerns and the vast assortment of firewalls, proxy servers and other ever more complicated security devices out there, and simple connectivity is tougher than you'd think.

Fortunately, Glance has spent years working on the problem.  First, when connecting to a Glance session, everyone makes an outgoing connection to our servers.  This means no one needs to open their firewall to incoming connections just for Glance.  Second, Glance can use multiple protocols to connect.  A direct TCP connection is the fastest.  Most firewalls will allow this, but a simple rule can be added by an administrator if needed for best performance.  Glance can also connect via HTTP, the protocol used to browse the Web.  Typically, if you can surf the Web, you can join a Glance session.  Yes, even if you're behind a proxy server.

Last, we've found that just connecting isn't enough.  Too many things along the way can cause a connection to drop, from flaky routers to weak wireless signals.  Normally you don't notice this when surfing the Web, maybe a page or graphic doesn't load sometimes, but you just click the link again or hit refresh.  But a streaming service needs to keep reconnecting if a connection drops or times out.  This is what Glance does, sometimes even switching protocols if one is proving to be too unreliable.

StreamShaping™

Glance's unique (and patent-pending) StreamShaping technology lets all participants in multi-guest sessions enjoy the best possible viewing experience, regardless of their different network connection speeds. StreamShaping continuously optimizes each person's view to the speed of his or her network connection.  Each guest sees updates as quickly as possible and no one falls behind.

Many web conferencing services perform poorly when participants connect at different network speeds.  People with slow connections will often find their views eventually fall many seconds or even minutes behind those on faster networks.  To avoid this problem, Glance used to send screen updates only as fast as the slowest-connected guest could download them, so everyone's view stayed in sync. That worked well when everyone had a good connection.  But if one guest was on a slow connection, everyone else�s view would slow to that guest's speed.

StreamShaping technology eliminates all of these issues.  It delivers the best possible experience by sending participants as many updates as their particular connections permit, without letting anyone fall behind.  Guests with fast download speeds see as many screen updates as their network connections allow.  Those with slower connections may take slightly more time to receive updates, but they never fall behind.  StreamShaping continuously adjusts what is sent to each person, based on his or her instantaneous network speed.  If a guest's network initially is congested and then opens up, that person's view speeds up as well.

Development of StreamShaping technology was one of the main reasons Glance was able to increase the maximum number of guests on a session to 100 from our earlier 15.  At no extra charge!

Our Colocation Facilities

Glance's servers are located in high-reliability facilities on both the East and West coasts of the United States.  Of course they have the usual battery backups, generators, security and redundant equipment.  But the most important reason we chose these locations was that they were able to provide very high speed connectivity directly to multiple top-tier backbone networks of the Internet.  For you, this means the highest speed and lowest latency for your sessions. 

Having multiple locations means high reliability for you.  Our main Web servers are located on the East coast, but if that facility suddenly disappeared, monitoring locations around the country would detect it and our West coast facility would take over within minutes.

But our alternate locations are not just spares.  We distribute sessions among servers across the country (and soon around the world!).  We have the technology to figure out which is the closest server to you, and host your session there.

Our People

Hey, all this technology is great and makes Glance a great service.  But technology doesn't solve every problem.  That's why we have a staff of friendly, knowledgeable people ready to help you.

Give us a call, we always try to answer on the first ring (9-5 US Eastern time), or send us an email.  We don't outsource customer support.  Why would you want to talk to a call center?  And why would we want to give up talking to our current or potential customers?